It's impossible to take Xbox seriously when it says it wants to reach one billion players per day. It's not a plan, it's red meat for shareholders
"I want to entertain a billion people a day thing. This is the part where I think you're just straight up lying. That is a line you include because you're trying to make it seem like there's a big bold vision behind what amounts to a lot of small risk averse decisions. The stuff that they're actually outlining, past the cuts, there's a new C-suite position managing the Xbox games portfolio. We've got managerial streamlining. We're going to get rid of all those layers of management, i.e., the good paying jobs at these companies. We're going to get rid of all that. We're going to manage our games portfolio more sensibly. We're going to exploit our IP. We're going to reduce costs through layoffs. These are the things that you do when you don't really have a vision or you certainly don't have an optimistic one, right? Because you are tearing up a thing that you acquired at great expense. You may not like that Spencer and Microsoft spent all this money, but to a degree, okay, you bought a fleet of game studios fairly recently. It now takes any of these studios about five to eight years to crank out a game. We are only a few years into this. As you said, effectively this happened yesterday and you're experiencing buyer's remorse and now you are just blowing away the capacity of the things you acquired to do anything. And they're probably smart enough to know that, but on the one hand, they are beholden to investors and a management culture of it is they like hearing things that are very hard nosed and mercenary and frankly, anti-labor, right? They like the idea. We've talked about this before on the podcast. Since COVID, there's been a long-standing resentment of the sort of C-suite class and tech of their pampered, privileged, spoiled employees who make too much money and provide too little value. They like hearing about layoffs both because it increases your margins, but also they ideologically want to smack around their highly paid, highly skilled workforce. But even those sorts of people, as awful as they can be, they also like to hear a case for growth, right? They like to hear, what are we building toward? How are we going to move this into a categorically, by like multiplicative factors, a stronger business? And in all of this, Sharma doesn't really have one. And so she says like, I want to serve a billion people every day. And in the meantime, she's saying that, but actually what she can go do is browbeat Todd Howard and be like, look, fucker, you need to make another fallout and Elder Scrolls 6 need to be out yesterday. That's what you can actually do. The build it users billion people thing is sort of a faux optimistic sop to, yeah, I'm a visionary corporate strategist."
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It's impossible to take Xbox seriously when it says it wants to reach one billion players per day. It's not a plan, it's red meat for shareholders
